Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system for receiving data from a plurality of external devices and managing the received data.
Description of the Related Art
Nowadays, various cloud services are provided as a service that allows a user to use various applications operating on a server provided on the internet. In the cloud service such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or the Platform as a Service (PaaS), a cloud service vendor provides a system administrator with resources such as a virtual machine and a storage via a network. For example, a plurality of virtual machines and storages operating on a server computer existing in a data center on the internet are provided as the resources. The virtual machines are logical computers in which servers are divided or integrated by a logical unit irrespective of physical configurations through virtualization technology, and the logical computers can operate respectively on independent operating systems. Therefore, the system administrator can establish a system for providing a unique service by using the resources such as the virtual machines and the storages provided by the cloud service vendor.
For example, the system established on the cloud service includes a web server, an application server, and a storage system. Herein, functions of the web server and the application server are realized by a group of virtual machines. The web server communicates with an external device existing outside the system to receive a request therefrom, so that the web server or the application server executes processing according to the request. Further, the web server has a function for receiving data from the external device and transferring the data to the storage system or the application server. The data processed by the application server is stored in a database managed by the storage system. A program for realizing the system and various kinds of data for providing the service are stored in the storage system.
In recent years, with a rapid spread of the cloud service, types and amounts of data handled by the cloud service have been increasing. In such a situation, there has been provided a method for concurrently processing data of greater amounts by efficiently using the resources that constitute the system to distribute a load for receiving or processing data transmitted from the outside.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2014-021854 discusses a technique for causing a plurality of requests with respect to a system established on a cloud service to be distributed to and processed by a plurality of servers that constitutes the system via a load distribution device (load balancer). Herein, in the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2014-021854, focusing on the fact that the processing capacity of the load distribution device can be a bottleneck in processing a plurality of requests with respect to the system, a request having a large data size is directly transmitted to the server from a request source without passing through the load distribution device. Through the above technique, a processing load relating to data reception executed by the load distribution device is reduced. When the data is directly transmitted to the server, a request source previously requests the load distribution device for address information such as an internet protocol (IP) address and a host name to identify the server as a transmission destination.
Then, various kinds of data are transmitted to the above-described system established on the cloud service from various kinds of external devices. The data transmitted from the external devices are different not only in a data size but also in a format and/or granularity of data. For example, the format of data may be ZIP format or Extensible Markup Language (XML) format, and the granularity of data refers to a degree of amount of items or units included in the content thereof. A web server or an application server in the system has to execute data processing with a different processing load according to the format and/or the granularity of data. Particularly, there is a case where the web server executes processing of storing data transmitted from the external device in the storage system or processing of transferring data to the application server while taking differences in the format and/or the granularity of data into consideration.
When the technique discussed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2014-021854 is applied to the above system, data having a large size transmitted from the external device can be directly transmitted to the storage system without passing through the web server. With this configuration, the processing load relating to data reception executed by the web server in the system can be reduced.
However, as described above, the data transmitted from various external devices is different not only in a data size but also in a format and granularity of data. Therefore, in the storage system, the data may be managed while differences in the formats and the granularity are not taken into consideration because the data does not pass through the web server. Accordingly, when the application server within the system executes processing by using the data stored in the storage system, there is a risk in which an additional processing load may be applied in comparison to the case where the above-described technique for causing the external device to directly transmit the data to the storage system is not applied thereto.
Further, in the storage system, there is a case where the data is managed while the variations in types of the external devices are not taken into consideration. If the data is managed in such a manner, for example, when a cause of the error occurring in the system has to be analyzed, there is a problem in which a transmission source of data stored in the storage system, which can be the cause of the error, may not be identified easily.